Ryan Braun and Baseball’s New Drug Era

On Monday afternoon, Major League Baseball suspended Ryan Braun, an outfielder for the Milwaukee Brewers and winner of the 2011 National League Most Valuable Player award, for the rest of the season, which amounts to sixty-five games, and which would include the postseason, were the Brewers playing well enough to make it there. Braun will forfeit more than three million dollars in salary, but will be eligible to return, technically in good standing, for the beginning of next season. The suspension was essentially a plea deal between Braun and the M.L.B., stemming from his connection to the Biogenesis “anti-aging” clinic in South Florida, which reportedly provided banned substances to several players and which, under the threat of legal action, began coöperating in June with the league’s investigation. More suspensions loom, including what is expected to be a lengthy one for the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, who was supposed to be spending these later years chasing the all-time home-run record but, it now appears, may instead be chased out of the game.

Last night, after yet another day of discouraging baseball news, I put on a few minutes of the third installment of HBO’s “When It Was a Game,” a lush and deeply comforting documentary series about baseball’s so-called glory days, dating from the Depression to the beginning of free agency, in the early nineteen-seventies. Part Three features fine archival film of the heroes of the sixties—Mantle, Mays, Koufax, Gibson—paired with remembrances from former players and usual-suspect baseball commentators, folks like Bob Costas and Billy Crystal. It’s in the Ken Burns mode—baseball as mostly peaceful national treasure, a symbol of America as it should be—but amid the home-movie nostalgia the film highlights the sixties as a contentious era in which the economics of the sport, which favored owners at the expense of players, finally became untenable. For years, thanks to the reserve clause in contracts, the rights to players were retained by their team, leaving the players little leverage to negotiate better salaries. Fans and writers liked the system because it led to years of stability among their favorite clubs: Mickey Mantle was a Yankee, plain and simple and forever. The players, meanwhile, mostly hated it, because it kept them under the thumbs of stingy owners. In the film, players recall signing paltry contracts as rookies, when the league minimum was about five grand, and working odd jobs every offseason for their whole careers. Curt Flood, an outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, challenged all this in 1969, torpedoing his career in the fight, and the reserve clause was finally eliminated in 1975, giving way to the modern free-agency system. It was a win for fairness, but something was lost—the sense of baseball, as in the film’s title, as “a game” rather than a business. This is mostly bunk, of course. Baseball has always been a business, regardless of our collective childlike refusal to recognize it as such, but it was easier to ignore that fact when the owners were keeping the money side secret.

“When It Was a Game” is a reminder of an essential conflict in baseball: that fans, writers, and players each experience the game in their own ways, and want and expect different things from it. In practical terms, it emerges from our discrete roles: fans want their teams to win, writers act as worried guardians of the longer historical narratives of the sport (but are also hungry for a good story), and players want all kinds of things—to do well, to earn respect from their teammates, to make money, to stay healthy, to get home from time to time to see their kids. These roles mostly support each other, forming the foundation of what the writer Robert Lipsyte identified as “SportsWorld,” the great national money-printing business. But there is a darker side to this conflict: as much as we venerate athletes in America, with attention and riches and the respect implicit in cultural capital, we are also deeply hostile toward them. We complain when players fail on the field or demand huge contracts in the offseason. And, having been sure all along that they were stupid and overpaid and not worthy of our respect, we take a kind of perverse thrill when their personal weaknesses are revealed, when they somehow go broke despite earning millions of dollars or run afoul of the law. It is envy, perhaps, but also a form of self-loathing—a shame about the amount of energy and time we devote to frivolous games with outcomes completely outside our control. This is the id of the sports fan in his living room, and of the talk-radio host barking in your car, and of the grizzled columnist writing the umpteenth article about how the latest generation of jocks is tarnishing the past. An open secret, in some ways: we love sports but kind of hate the players.

And so, in the past day, we have enjoyed the release of endorphins that comes with giving Ryan Braun exactly the kind of public tomato-pelting he deserves. He is the most irritating kind of cheater—a player who skirted a failed drug test, in 2011, on what appeared even at the time to be a technicality and then, rather than quietly thanking the fates, instead held a sanctimonious press conference, in which he said several variations of: “I’ve tried to handle the entire situation with honor, with integrity, with class, with dignity, and with professionalism, because that’s who I am and that’s how I’ve always lived my life.” Later, he seemed to impugn the person who had collected his urine sample but failed to follow delivery protocol, saying, “There were a lot of things that we learned about the collector, about the collection process, about the way that the entire thing worked that made us very concerned and very suspicious about what could have actually happened.” Perhaps he was just referring to flaws in the testing process, but those suggestions of nefariousness (“a lot of things that we learned about the collector”), in light of what amounts to his admission on Monday that he subsequently violated the league’s drug policies, seem especially scurrilous on Braun’s part. He is a diminished figure, and perhaps as ruined as a man who is guaranteed to earn a hundred and thirteen million dollars between now and 2020 can be.

In the past, the head-shaking and outrage directed at steroid and other P.E.D. users mostly came from fans, or from writers, to whom moralism comes naturally. Yet, over the past twenty-four hours, and in what may be a watershed moment, current players have elbowed in to express their anger at Braun. This is a new phenomenon: before, players would remain mostly mum about infractions by their peers; the antagonism between players and owners left over from the reserve clause has never fully disappeared. “I think everybody’s frustrated, especially the players. I think we all feel a little bit cheated,” the Seattle Mariners pitcher Joe Saunders told the A.P., in an article that features a half-dozen such condemnations of Braun from around the league. (Some players, including members of the Brewers, have come to Braun’s defense and said that they accept his apology.) ESPN’s Buster Olney writes that recently a big-league pitcher threw at a suspected P.E.D. user as a form of inner-circle retribution. (Olney doesn’t name the pitcher, though, giving the whole thing the feeling of a parable.) More notably, the players’ union has said that it will not defend players from drug suspensions if there is solid evidence against them. That’s not to say that the union is throwing its members to the dogs, but it does reflect an important policy shift. The union has decided that, at this stage of the drug era, the greater threat is not M.L.B. overreaching to investigate and punish players but rather the existence of cheaters among the ranks. This makes a lot of sense: drug users threaten the livelihood of clean players, and hurt the league’s reputation. The recognition that a clean sport benefits the players was one of the reasons that the union agreed to stricter drug-testing policies and stiffer penalties in the most recent collective-bargaining agreement.

Yet the way in which league executives have pursued the Biogenesis case may give some players pause. Ryan Braun is not accused of failing a drug test; neither is Alex Rodriguez or any of the other players who are likely to face suspensions. Instead, Braun was suspended for what the M.L.B. called, vaguely, “violations of the Basic Agreement and its Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program.” As Tom Verducci, of Sports Illustrated, notes, the suspension was issued essentially at the sole discretion of league commissioner Bud Selig. Granted, Braun took the deal, and others connected to Biogenesis may choose to accept a similar arrangement, but while the clean players who are fed up with cheaters sharing their dugouts might be happy about that, it’s worth pausing a moment to consider some of the lessons of history, and the bargaining leverage with owners and league management that their forebears fought so hard to achieve. We’ve reached an unusual moment in which the desires of fans, writers, players, and owners seem to align: everyone wants a clean game. But now, as always, it’s the players who are held to the highest standards, who face the most scrutiny, and who have the most to lose.

Photograph by Marc Serota/Getty Images.

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